Books

Media Giants has developed several beautiful coffee table books over the years, including loving tributes to 45 years of football on television, 50 years of TV in Australia, a client’s beautiful cook book, and a celebration of great sporting moments.

Given that so much of our work is in the online world of fast-turnarounds and equally fast use-by-dates, the Giants enjoy the larger challenge and scale that a coffee table book invariably presents. Our books tend to be very rich, lavishly illustrated, well researched and delivered on time and to budget.

Some of our greatest literary hits include:

50 YEARS OF AUSTRALIAN TV
(Hardie Grant, 2006)

Giants director Nick Place is literally a TV baby (his parents met at the start-up of HSV 7 in 1956). That, along with Media Giants’ strong links to the commercial networks and ABC TV, and our strong publishing background, meant we were the logical company to chronicle television’s half century in Australia. This ambitious book, created with publisher Hardie Grant, charts TV year-by-year from 1956, reporting in time-capsule mode on celebrities and shows as they happened, from Happy Hammond and Skippy to the live telecast of the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre. A huge success, this book was several years in the making but worth every moment.

HEART OF THE GAME
(Hardie Grant, 2001)

As a precursor to 50 years of Television in Australia, Media Giants created Heart of the Game, also with Hardie Grant as publisher. This book charted the growth of football on television and in particular, Channel Seven’s long involvement with the sport from the earliest attempts at coverage through to when Seven lost the rights to rival networks in 2001. A warm and loving chronicle, Heart of the Game was a sales success and remains an important historical document. Not surprisingly, given our collective love of the game and the fact that director Michael Roberts is a leading AFL historian, Media Giants has created several other football-themed books, including The AFL Yearbook: 1999, 2000 (Penguin) and Champions of Essendon (Hardie Grant).

GREAT AUSTRALIAN SPORTING MOMENTS
(Melbourne University Press, 2000)

This was a classic study in Media Giants’ ability to meet the most improbable of deadlines. We managed to research, write and illustrate a major coffee table book for Melbourne University Press in little more than three months. By managing the book in-house and spreading the writing across many of our core staff and other contributors, we were able to keep to schedule while still maintaining quality control. The result was a beautiful book that sold well over 10,000 copies in its first few months in the shops – and which prompted energetic debate among sports fans across the country.

OH, AND ALSO …

Both of Media Giants’ directors, Nick Place and Michael Roberts, are published in their own right, Nick as a novelist and Michael as a sports historian.